From the Magazine

The Queen of Cozy Cool

Anya Hindmarch is not just another successful bag designer. She’s also the Conservative Party’s fund-raising ace, the mayor’s choice to spiff up London for the Olympics, the creator of the “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” tote, and the mother of five kids. Intimidated yet? Keep reading.

Anya Hindmarch at home in London. By Simon Upton/The Interior Archive.

The trouble with glossy magazines is that they tend to be stuffed with articles about handbag designers—the sort of women who, with their perfectly styled lives, immaculate houses, and adoring partners, make you want to become a hermit. Well, Anya Hindmarch is indeed a handbag designer; she has the requisite fabulous life, tasteful home, and loving husband. She is also beautiful and self-deprecating, and has five children aged 5 to 20 and a philanthropic bent which spans causes from cancer care to Britain’s Conservative Party. And in June the Queen awarded Anya her M.B.E. (Member of the British Empire, for you Americans) at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. If you can take it, read on.

The Conservative Party’s treasurer, Michael Spencer, asked her to chair its largest annual fund-raiser, the 2008 Black and White Ball. He called Anya because “I felt we needed something very contemporary, very edgy, and a new perspective.” Anya’s solution was to carve up the venue (a very large tent in London’s Battersea Park) into eight garden-themed areas, which could be sold off to individual sponsors. The effect, which included a kitchen garden complete with potting shed, and vegetable and herb gardens, was fantastically British, stylish, and an odd combination of cozy and cool—brand values which the Conservatives seem to have embraced enthusiastically. Spencer says, “It was universally acclaimed as an outstanding success and has set a new standard for others to aspire to.” Conservative Party leader David Cameron adds, “Anya managed to create a party that was extremely stylish and enjoyable while also raising a very substantial amount of money. Her creative and organizational energy is awe-inspiring.”

She is surprisingly political. In fact, she attributes the very birth of her company to Thatcherism. “I started my business when I was 18, and I realized the difference it made having Thatcher in power,” she says. “It was the start of privatization—there was a feeling of ‘Get out there, get going, be an entrepreneur.’ I’ve seen what politics can do to make a difference. It really inspires me and that’s why I’ve been passionate about it.” She continues to support the Conservative Party and says, “We do badly need to change now.”

Anya has become London’s go-to girl for serious causes which need a bit of style. She says casually, “I am going to be helping [Mayor Boris Johnson] with how London looks for the Olympics.” When not fixing London or egging the Opposition into power, Anya focuses on her eponymous handbag company, which she started fresh out of school. During a brief Italian-language course in Florence, she says, “I saw a bag out there that I thought would sell in England—a drawstring duffel bag.” In her distinctive matter-of-fact manner, she continues, “Took the bag back to London, showed a few people.” The teenager found manufacturers and persuaded Harpers & Queen magazine to feature the bag as an offer to its readers. She sold about 500 bags and “went from there, designed more bags, starting selling to shops.”

For the next two to three years Anya worked from her kitchen table, often thinking, What the hell am I doing? “All of my friends were at university, and I was a bit lonely.” Her breakthrough was selling to a few good American stores. The first Anya Hindmarch shop was on the second floor of a building in London’s South Kensington. “Slowly but surely everyone came up those little steps on Walton Street: Princess Diana, Elle Macpherson, royal queens and princesses from European countries.”

Soon Anya opened a shop in Hong Kong, then another in London, then one in New York. This month she launches the Bespoke workshop, dedicating her Pont Street store entirely to the creation of handmade, embossed, old-fashioned but quirky goods, from jewelry cases personalized with a customer’s own photos to custom-made wallets. The other 53 stores from Los Angeles to Japan sell her distinctive handbags, luggage, clothing, shoes, and beachwear—a success story which Tommy Hilfiger attributes to her “not trying to be Gucci or Prada. She takes her own road. I think her sensibility is sophisticated and chic and not so outspoken.” Hilfiger thinks she is an “incredible designer,” and continues, “I would bet on her to be one of the next big, world-class designers.”

The Hindmarch headquarters are housed in an old stable in Battersea. The office is open-plan, busy but not messy, and painted in huge letters on the far wall is the slogan “Everybody needs handbags.” The staff appear to be the product of good genes and lots of country weekends rather than Botox and chemical peels. Despite all this heavenly loveliness, Anya is tough and ambitious, which, when said of an Englishwoman, is not often a compliment. Yet she manages to do it in a way that is not apologetic, ball-breaking, or threatening to other women. “I think that it comes out of an insecurity in me—I don’t like not being liked,” she says. “I believe generally that you get more from people if you’re nice to them. I’m not sure if that’s that cool, but, hey, I’m not particularly cool and that’s fine.”

Being “not particularly cool” seems to be a cunning business strategy: last year, the company’s gross income went up 43 percent from the previous year. And since the privately owned company took on a group of investors in the fall of 2006 (at which point it was valued at $38 million), gross income has increased by 210 percent. In the final quarter of 2008, retail was up 19 percent from the same period in the previous year, while total sales for the same period increased 18 percent. There are now 300 Anya Hindmarch employees worldwide.

The designer’s famous “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” canvas tote. By John Manno.

Of the gazillion bags Anya has sold, perhaps the most famous is the “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” canvas tote she created in league with the grass-roots organization We Are What We Do. “We came up with the idea of piggybacking the ‘It bag’ philosophy,” she says. The right people were photographed carrying it, supply was limited, and different colors were sent to different territories. The formula worked astoundingly well—90,000 bags were sold. “I took Hugo, my oldest son, to Tokyo when we launched it there. The launch was at 11 o’clock the next morning, and as we drove home from dinner there were 8,000 people queued up down the street.”

Business is in Anya’s blood. “I come from a background of business. My father had a business at 18,” she says. “I was the baby in the cot under the desk. My mother was in labor with me as she finished typing an invoice.” Her younger brother, William, has a company which runs lotteries for fancy cars in airports, and her elder sister, Nicole, founded the Wedding List Company. Even their childhood games augured well. “We were always selling things outside the front gate, apples or carrots,” says Nicole. William says, “I hate to admit they both used to dress me up in girls’ clothes, so I guess her fashion thing started early.” Regarding his famous sister, he says with immense pride, “People have always asked, ‘Are you related to Anya?’ In fact, my wife says 100 percent it’s why she married me.”

Anya’s best friend, Belle Robinson, who, with her husband, John, owns the British clothing chain Jigsaw, says that, although “there are a lot of filthy, dirty stories I could tell about her, [she is] slightly, irritatingly wonderful.” Robinson met Anya 15 years ago at a supper hosted by Anya’s then new boyfriend and future husband, James Seymour. James was a widower with three young children. “When I met her she was only 25, and I was recently bereaved,” says James over a glass of wine at their kitchen table. He describes finding himself back on the singles market with three children aged between 18 months and four years old. “I came with baggage.” He adds fondly, “The baggage thought she was great, which was lucky. And they still think that she’s great.” Anya says, “I remember meeting James and thinking he was the most lovely man I had met. The thing is, weirdly, I knew the moment that I met him I was going to marry him. It was sort of like home written in neon on his head.”

Anya with her husband, James Seymour, at the Anya Hindmarch offices. By Matteo Bazzoffia.

The couple waited three years before marrying, and in turn waited before having two more children together. “I wanted to make sure that the older three felt that they had got a family again,” says Anya. Although James’s first wife will never be forgotten, Anya is now very much the mother of five. “I have inherited, which is brilliant, three virtual scholars with really thin ankles, which are both things I really miss,” she says with a laugh. And she is a good mother—she once texted her teenage son Bert, who was proposing to shave his head, “Never do things by halves, but remember you have a big nose.”

The couple now also work together. As finance director, James says, “I look after all the finance, the legal, the franchises. I do one area, Anya does another area. If we did the same area we would fight all the time.” The couple decided to work together when Anya was pregnant with their son Felix, who is now nine. “I think she was very concerned about what would happen when she took some time off, if indeed she could take some time off,” says James. “I said, I’ll sit in your chair for six months because I know what’s happening. Because the thing about living with an entrepreneur is that they bring it home all the time—there’s no separation between work and home life at all.” Anya says, “It was the most frightening decision I have ever made without any doubt at all. But we decided to take that risk, and it felt about the most exciting thing ever, because it’s suddenly like being with my best friend all day with a project that is also my best friend.” James laughs wryly. “She has no idea how lucky she is.”

Anya’s London living room. By James Merrell.

James is a handsome, honest, funny, straight-up kind of a guy, and he admits, “I’m more social than she is. She would rather have a boiled egg and go to bed. We get invited out a lot, and she finds it more of an imposition than I do, because I need a lot less sleep than she does.” Anya and James’s home is in one of London’s ritziest neighborhoods, Belgravia, but it is (typically for the couple) not show-offy or grand. The decoration is contemporary but eminently livable—rather like her handbags. It’s clearly a family home, with photographs of the children everywhere—quirky and cool without being pretentious. The pressure of high-volume motherhood combined with running her business does occasionally get to Anya. In an interview with British Vogue she spoke of the necessary juggling. “There are always school events at the end of term, 4 events per school, so that’s 16 in one week. It’s my sister’s birthday, and on Thursday we’re giving an 18th-birthday party for Hugo, my eldest son, and 69 of his friends. The tutors all require presents at Christmas, and then they’ll tell you to wear antlers to a carol service. I’ll just be quietly rocking in the corner in my antlers, crying.”

One of Anya’s school friends, now a close neighbor, Lady Tang, remembers their days at the Catholic convent New Hall School. “My mother would always say, ‘Why can’t you look more like the Hindmarch girls?’ It’s scarred me for life,” she says deadpan. “I was rather glad that Anya smoked, because it was one thing that meant she wasn’t so perfect. I got expelled and she didn’t, and that’s the story of our lives. But every time I lose it I think, I must pull myself together and be more like Anya.” Another close friend, perfumer Jo Malone, who created her most recent scent, Pomegranate Noir, in honor of Anya, says, “She’s the woman I would like to be, and I think lots of women would say that.”